The Luxembourgish singer-songwriter has made a curious career move with his latest single, and it's one that deserves closer scrutiny. While most artists emerging from the folk-indie crossroads tend to smooth their rough edges in the studio, Jeremy Engel has taken the opposite approach—doubling down on the raw immediacy of live performance and wrapping it in a deceptively uptempo package that refuses to sit still long enough to be categorised.

There's something quietly defiant about Jake Vera's debut album *Lost*, released this past October—a record that arrives not with fanfare but with the hushed determination of someone who has something urgent to say. In an era where algorithms curate our playlists and artificial intelligence threatens to homogenize the very notion of artistic expression, this Dallas-based alt-rock artist has crafted a deliberately human document, warts and all.

The transatlantic collaboration between Russell Stewart and Joe Garmon has yielded a second offering that positions itself defiantly against the tide of digital artifice. Released on Christmas Day 2025, *Ghost of Tomorrow* arrives as both manifesto and meditation, a conscious rejection of algorithmic composition wrapped in the familiar textures of hard rock's storied lineage.

The compilation album has always occupied a peculiar position in the musical ecosystem. Too often dismissed as mere samplers or promotional vehicles, the format at its best functions as cartography—mapping territories both geographical and aesthetic that might otherwise remain unexplored. Home Hearing Records' *Adventures in Sound Vol.2* operates firmly within this latter tradition, presenting ten tracks that share little beyond their refusal to compromise and their commitment to the vital, messy business of making music that matters.

The Katoomba-based outfit Craig Small Music has emerged from the Blue Mountains with a single that manages to marry antipodean rock sensibilities with an unexpected anime-inflected narrative twist. "THE WOLF," released this month, represents the kind of patient, considered songcraft that feels increasingly rare in our rapid-fire streaming age.

The boldest artistic statements emerge not from studied calculation but from genuine obsession, and Lekursi's "Amarna Letters" pulses with the fervour of someone transfixed by forgotten empires and their uncanny resonance with our present moment. This isn't heritage tourism dressed in electronica; rather, it's a serious attempt to excavate meaning from the rubble of antiquity, specifically the reign of Akhenaten, that most peculiar of pharaohs who demolished Egypt's pantheon in favour of solar monotheism around 1351 BCE.

The opening bars of "Hellya" arrive like a clenched fist finally released—guitars snarling with the kind of restless energy that recalls the best moments of PJ Harvey's *Rid of Me* or the raw urgency that made Sleater-Kinney essential listening. LESS has crafted not merely a single but a manifesto, one that burns with the frustration of an artist trapped between geographical limitations and the soul-destroying demands of modern musical commerce.

Ed Silva understands something fundamental about atmosphere: it cannot be rushed, manufactured through formula, or achieved by simply layering sounds until something sticks. "An Eerie Feeling," the latest offering from his Savannah-based Cries of Redemption project, demonstrates this understanding with remarkable clarity. This is music built on patience and conviction, the product of an artist who has spent nearly two decades—since those early ReverbNation and Kompoz days of 2006—learning how to translate specific emotional states into sound.

The trajectory from sideman to frontman is rarely straightforward. For every decade spent behind the kit, providing the rhythmic backbone for someone else's vision, the decision to step forward and claim centre stage carries a particular weight. Max Norton understands this calculus intimately. After ten years as a professional drummer—gracing stages at Bonnaroo and Coachella, appearing on Seth Myers and David Letterman—the Tampa-born, Nashville-honed musician has made that leap with "The Wolves," a single that arrives December 5th trailing the promise of transformation.

Social Gravy's "Rapture and Rupture" announces itself not with flash but with purpose, two guitar lines spiraling around each other like DNA strands or quarreling lovers who cannot quite let go. This is intentional cartography – the instrumental architecture tells you everything before Brad's vocal even enters the frame. The relationship between these guitars becomes the song's animating principle, their conversation ranging from tender counterpoint to controlled friction, and it's this dialogic quality that elevates the track beyond mere relationship post-mortem into something approaching the mythic.